King Croesus

This blog is about the KCCD2009 (King Croesus Contempt for Death) Trip and it's preparations. The journey will be performed on 2x 1939 Nimbus motorcycles with sidecars and ETD is April 2009. ETA is unknown, as you never know if it's a Sweet Chariot or an Infernal Machine you ride.

We crossed the border from Semey and into Russia, and took the night just on the other side of the border. From there we moved on to Barnaul, Gorno Altaysk and crossed the border after Koch Agach (where Klaus almost drove straight in to a herd of camels in the middle of the night, close shave), the famous end of the world town.

Altay is a very beautiful area, and the roads are perfect. Really good place to take your bike for a spin.

Anyway, sorry for these lousy updates, but I just ain’t got time to write any proper now, so just enjoy the pics.

In Gorno Altaysk we ficed the broken jerry can holders and bought 2 Ural tires for the bikes. We were lucky as the devil himself the day he was kicked out of paradice as we met some English speaking bikers visiting town. Without them this would have been hard.

As mentioned before, Kazakhstan is extremely interesting due to the contrasts. After seeing the good sides of the country we chose a route to Russia to see the kind of places I’m addicted to; polluted shit holes that paint disgust on environmentalists faces. Living memorials of human disrespect of nature and people. The result of the extreme Soviet times megalomania. We went by Pavlovdar, to Semeypalatinsk and took a detour to Kurchatov before heading back to Russia.

The first highlight was of course Pavlovdar, which is famous for air pollution from the numerous metallurgist plants. The smog was thick and nice, and as a memory we cut out a cube of congested air and put in our backpacks. Unfortunately all the decent pics I shot there is in Raw format, and as some Kazakh dude has got my computer with the software I need to convert the files you’ll have to wait to see the pics from paradise.

Between Pavlodar and Semey the fork on Klaus bike broke outside a small village, but we got help from some locals and welded it, after being waiting for the power to come back for 5 hours. They did not want any money, but I gave them a Singapore dollar, a Cuban convertible peso and some Indonesian rupiahs which was very popular as he collected foreign money.

Sermeypalatinsk, or Semey, is unfortunately mostly known for the Semeypalatinsk Polygon test ground, where they blew off some 460 Russian mushrooms. The damages from the radiations lives on very well, and cancer and other not so funny diseases are still very popular in this area.However, this is city used to be the capital of Kazakhstan for a short while, and has been some sort of cultural capital. The city was the home of Abay Kunanbaev, the Kazakh cultural guru. Fyodor Dostoevsky was another fine chap living here in exile among other big Russian writers, which was all sent here because they had some funny ideas about democracy, ideas that really weren’t that good back at that time time.

From Semey we took the detour to Kurchatov, the control center for the Polygon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipalatinsk_Test_Site) . This is a very interesting place, build up in a short time period from 49 and onwards, today a semi-deserted ghost-town. A lot of buildings are uninhabited and falling down. The only thing up there today is a research center and a museum about the test site. The museum is said to be very interesting, and that why we went 150km in heavy rain to get there on very bad roads. When we got there they told us we needed a permit to enter the museum, and we could get it in Astana. I said “That’s great, I’ll be back with the permit in a half hour, it’s only 1000 kilometres” , then we went back to Semey.The test site itself is still very polluted, there is no marking of radiation hot spots, no fences or guards, so feel free to go.

We waited in Astana till Burabike was up, and it was indeed a good decision though it was mayhem with visas expiring. However, if you got the right friends the right places, it always sorts out.

Anyhow, Burabike was a highlight. A very good festival, about 1000 bikes and 3000 people. Friendly people, nice girls, cold beer, a lot of very good Russian rock bands. In short a very good party, highly reccomended. Go there next year, www.burabike.kz

In the November issue of Biker Journalen, www.bikerjournalen.no there will be a story from the festival and biker culture in general.